My friend Rosie Harper posted a comment on Facebook that elicited a response from me. Her post and my comment raise a question that I believe is of vital importance to the authenticity, health and future of Christianity.
Rosie said she is thinking about belief and control. You can to a certain extent know what you believe, she said, and you can hear what other people say they believe. You can explore your reasons and their reasons – which might indeed be reasoned - or might be visceral. But what happens when you are told to believe something that you know you do not believe, especially if this is expected of you in order to be accepted as member of a group or church? Are you expected to affirm publicly what you do not believe internally? Should you lie in order to fulfil such a demand and make yourself acceptable? What place is there in a congregation or in the Church generally for telling people what they ought to believe? This whole question is, says Rosie, about power and control...... as usual!
I could never be a member of a group or congregation where people were expected to believe what the leaders taught, beliefs to be accepted without question. When I was in parish ministry, at St George’s Camberwell as a curate and then as vicar of St Faith’s Wandsworth, I never thought that people should believe what I believed, let alone that I had the right to impose a set of beliefs on them. I did, of course, being an individual who is not without prejudice and strong feelings, discuss and argue with people, but if they chose to come to church with their own particular set of beliefs, or with very fluid ideas about God and Jesus and faith, or with no particular belief at all, that was fine – typically Anglican. Of course it was – I was a child of Honest to God and the sixties.
As I’ve written elsewhere, when I was 11, nearly 12 years old, I fancied a boy in my class at school. I knew then, somehow, that this desire for another boy was my desire for the rest of my life, even though all the other boys seemed to desire girls. I also knew, somehow, that God, according to the Church, condemned such desire as sinful. I knew that whatever God or the Church said, my interior feelings were right and God was wrong. This is a scandal to the many who are opposed to LGBTQIA+ equality and equal marriage.
My feelings for other boys and my decision about following my intuition rather than Church teaching of God's rules remained my secret for many years. I was confirmed, accepted for ministry, ordained and licenced, all the while believing this.
I had been infected, and still am infected to some degree, as we all are, by internalising various elements of teaching and belief, somewhat unconsciously but with a shadow of unease, dogmas and teachings about God and Jesus that I thought were unbelievable, untrue, unhealthy, or 'required to be accepted as a Christian'. I put them into a different category from my personal beliefs based on experience, intuition and feelings, about my identity as a gay man, my sexuality and desires.
For me, the answer to Rosie’s question about belief and power and control is that the Church has to learn to teach people how to think through and emotionally process ideas and moral and ethical decisions in a way that are congruent with the teaching of Jesus. Christianity from the beginning has never quite fully grasped that the essence of Christian life and teaching is to open people to the ways in which our pattern of life will result in healthy, creative, evolving, unconditionally loving outcomes in this life for real people. We are all immersed in a Church culture that is unable to do this. It is, I think, worse now than it was several decades ago when there was more intelligent thinking and more trust in people's autonomy and personal wisdom.
A read through the comments on the current Thinking Anglican threads reacting to the Bishop of Oxford’s essay, Together in Love and Faith, shows how deeply immersed we are in a conversation about Biblical authority and the personal authority imposed by membership of particular traditions and tribal groups in the Church. We are having an intense conversation that is exemplary of Rosie’s concerns about belief, power and control. This conversation directly relates to the various reports, published and yet to be published, about abuse in the Church of England. It is almost impossible today to have a healthy conversation about the dynamics of today’s Church that result in such an unhealthy culture. The few friends I have who tentatively model my model of congregational life as ministering to people who chose to come to church with their own particular set of beliefs, or with very fluid ideas about God and Jesus and faith, or with no particular belief at all, do so somewhat secretively. This model is taboo in today’s Church, anxious about the state of its finances and declining congregations.
I don’t have an answer to Rosie’s question about what to do when you are told to believe something that you know you do not believe, especially if this is expected of you in order to be accepted as member of a group or church. Well – I do have an answer, but for the many of you dedicated and committed to your own congregation or to lay or ordained ministry as a priest or bishop, it’s an answer you are inhibited from adopting. I have so internalised a contemplative activist faith, and a dedicated meditative reflective life, that I am able to sustain myself without church attendance. As I result I miss deeply the gifts of friendship and the energy of engagement Sunday by Sunday with other people. I also benefit from not receiving further unhealthy, infectious, un-Christian teachings and world views from hymns, prayers and sermons. I also have a rich company of friends, many virtual, some very present to me, with whom I engage deeply and creatively.
I wish there was a community I could be part of locally to engage with, but I’ve yet to find one. I know they exist for other friends. I have found them myself in the past, in Birmingham fifty years ago, Cambridge forty years ago and Manchester more recently – congregations where the life together, creative and free, mattered more than doctrine, tradition and orthodoxy. What I have know in the past and long for today is so far removed from today’s normative teaching and practice. A huge, transformative evolutionary breakthrough will happen – but not just yet.